Oct
12
James Merrill, Wagner, Childhood
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There are poets whose voices are so entwined with the linguistic and spiritual cadence of their contemporary times, that I can’t imagine them writing poetry in any other era aside from their own. T. S. Eliot and Paul Celan. John Ashbery comes to mind. Frederick Seidel, too. Then there are some poets who would be, more or less, the same kind of poets even if they were tele-transported and worm-holed, plopped down in a different era. I think Auden could have adapted to anything, given the largesse of his poetic voice and ambition. The voice of Akhmatova, too, transcends the particular strifes of the world she was living in. Cavafy, I can only imagine in the ancient worlds if not ours. But more than anyone, I can see James Merrill being able to embody any age, effortlessly. A few poets writing in the latter half of the 20th century might have been his equals in formal and technical mastery of the poetic language, but none of them - in my opinion - wielded such a mastery with such lyrical elegance and polish (this technical facility can be a minus sometimes for Merrill’s poetry, though). Even in his lesser poems, Merrill’s language is never less than beautiful.
Anyway, I thought about James Merrill because I have the DVD set of Wagner’s Der Ring, the Barenboim version, but I can’t ever seem to find the blocks of time to watch the damn thing. And whenever the thought of watching the Wagner DVD’s crosses my mind, I find myself involuntarily thinking about my childhood, which was not so happy except in its obsession with music. After one such instance, I tried to think of the reason why Wagner was triggering my childhood memories. And I discovered that it was because of these lines by Merrill, which must have made such an impression on me when I first read them when I was still a teenager, that they stayed in a corner of my mind ever since, still resonating -
They’re doing a Ring Cycle at the Met,
Four operas in one week, for the first time
Since 1939. I went to that one.
Then war broke out, Flagstad flew home, tastes veered
To tuneful deaths and dungeons. Next to Verdi,
Whose riddles I could whistle but not solve,
Wagner had been significance itself,
Great golden lengths of it, stitched with motifs,
A music in whose folds the mind, at twelve,
Came to its senses: Twin, Sword, Forest Bird,
Envy, Redemption through Love… But left unheard
These fifty years. A fire of answered prayers
Burned round that little pitcher with big ears
Who now wakes. Night. E-flat denotes the Rhine,
Where everything began. The world’s life. Mine.
(From “The Ring Cycle” by James Merrill; Image by Peter Garfield)
Aug
29
There is a reason why Koreans have not won the Nobel in literature yet - the Korean literary language translates rather poorly into English. Some of my favorite Korean stories and poems become pale and lifeless in their translated form. Even the beautifully spare poems by Ko Un, a poet who is perennially mentioned as one of the favorites to win the Nobel, become hollow, even a bit corny, when translated into English. A few months ago, I had a chance to talk to Mark Strand about Ko Un, whom he had met in Frankfurt, I believe. “Every word that comes out of the man’s mouth is poetry,” Strand said, “but I find his poems to be a bit slight.” After saying so, he immediately questioned the quality of the translation he’d read.
Anyways, I’m going away to my friend’s lake house in Woodstock until Sunday; the following is my own translation of one of Ko Un’s shorter poems. (See you next week.)
…
A Forest
It was left there.
Inside my mother’s wardrobe.
The old scent of blue naphthalin
Permeating her cherished mulberry silk;
It was borne with the wind headed there
And it was borne with the wind headed here.
I’d never stepped into or come out of that forest.
(Image: “Paradise 24″ by Thomas Struth)
Aug
20
Monica Vitti & Antonioni, via Anne Carson
Filed Under Poetry, Films | Leave a Comment
Anne Carson’s latest book, Decreation, is obsessed with the notion of the Sublime, Antonioni and Monica Vitti, among other topics. Many of the essays and poems are not so good. Actually, at the prospect of being pilloried by Carson fanatics, I must say I found much of the book to be pretty bad. Maybe it’s the ambition of her project Carson uses terms like “sublimity” and “the sublime” pretty indiscriminately. The inherent problem lies in that she writes about Longinus’ notion of the sublime and Kant’s notion of it, and she doesn’t make much of a distinction between the two. In turn, a few of the pieces in Decreation are intriguing but fuzzy disasters that read like pensées written by some brilliant grad student from a humanity department in a college near you.
I don’t know why I’m being so caustic on this post! Because there are some delicious moments in Carson’s book. “Gnosticism VI” is perhaps one of my favorite poems I’ve read in the recent years (I’ll post on this poem later, maybe.) And her encapsulation of Antonioni’s L’Avventura seems to me to be a perfect evocation of the film:
L’Avventura: caught in the time of the island, scraping themselves back and forth over the rocks, men slant against the wind and her golden hair going horizontal in whips on the ecstatic sea, boats roar up, roar off, men stand gazing - and as for the scandal of our abandonment in a universe of “sudden trembling love”…
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So on and so forth. Fantastic, no A universe of “sudden trembling love”… (I apologize for not keeping Carson’s line breaks, but I don’t know how to format line breaks on Wordpress!) I just thought to put the passage up since I’ve been reading too many mind-numbingly clerical summaries of L’Avventura, La Notte & L’Eclisse in the Antonioni obituaries everywhere. Carson’s description of certain moments and scenes from Antonioni’s films should be a good antidote for all of us.
And I realize I put up pictures of Monica Vitti when I should have posted Antonioni’s. It’s because I also know that I can never have space enough to write about my old Monica Vitti obsession. Besides, this statistical fact: although Antonioni is a beautiful man, seven out of ten people of reasonable level of sanity prefer looking at Monica Vitti to Antonioni, no matter their sexual orientation. I totally made that stat up because I’m insane.